


Flowers Will Grow On Your Grave

by Raepocalypse



Category: Block B
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hanahaki Disease, Light Angst, M/M, because i can't do full angst, dont worry they aren't gonna die bc i just, hanahaki, i cant do that to myself
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-04-27
Packaged: 2019-04-28 12:58:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14449773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raepocalypse/pseuds/Raepocalypse
Summary: Ahn Jaehyo is a coward, and he has taken the coward's way out his whole life. Now that Taeil is coughing up petals, what's the cowardly thing to do, though? And can he fix it?





	Flowers Will Grow On Your Grave

**Author's Note:**

> Let me preface by saying I'm not strong enough to break my own heart, so. 
> 
> Anyway, this is my first hanahaki because I hate myself, apparently, and because the Jaeil tag is starving. Also, I'm not sure if Kyung's actually moved out of the dorm, but he has in this, because I needed him to not be there thank you for your understanding.

Ahn Jaehyo is a coward. He hasn’t always been this way, but it’s been long enough that he doesn’t know how to go back from it, doesn’t know how to undo the distance he’s put between himself and everyone else. 

Ironically, it’s the man who caused it that’s the most worried about it. Well. Not his  _ fault _ , per se. It was never his fault that he fell in love, and it wasn’t his fault that the brilliant blue petals he coughed up started to be stained in blood terribly quickly. It wasn’t his fault that Jaehyo was in high school still and came home to see his brother catching petals in his hands. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t want the surgery. 

He got the surgery anyway. 

Jaehyo was relieved that he did, grateful even, because his brother had been only a few weeks from it being too late, and sometimes he still had nightmares about forget-me-nots growing out of his brother’s grave uncontrollably, never wilting, never fading, taking over the headstone and burying it. Sometimes, he couldn’t stop thinking about it, even after all these years. 

Now, when he meets his brother, he’s happy. Changin has a new girlfriend and she’s pretty and he says he loves her and he’s not coughing up petals, but Jaehyo is terrified anyway. He doesn’t say anything. He smiles and tells him he’s happy for him. He tells him he’s glad. He ignores the way his gut twists with the thought that maybe Changin doesn’t really love her yet, or that it hasn’t set in, or what happens if she falls out of love with him? Could that happen? What if something goes wrong? 

Changin tells him he hopes he finds someone too. Jaehyo hopes he never does. Love sounds like a fucking death sentence. 

Debuting as an idol was another thing that was hard, but he was brave enough for that at least. Or was it more cowardly this way? People fell in love with idols sometimes, and sasaeng fans would mail bloody petals to their idols as proof of their devotion, get angry when their idol didn’t meet them and try to fall in love back. Groups had to films regular spots and mention in vlives that if someone begins growing flowers for an idol, they should pursue the surgery immediately. Thank you for your support. Your safety matters. We hope you can still be a fan. 

It wasn’t terribly common, of course. It didn’t take lives every year. Still, there was the chance and so there was precautions. 

Jaehyo almost never had to deal with that, and that was a relief. Their group wasn’t really the most popular and he didn’t envy the ones who had to work hundreds of hours only to be accosted. His fans were good. He loved them. Luckily, he never had to fall  _ in love _ with them. 

It’s been years. Over half a decade. There’s only been a couple scares. Jihoon coughed up baby pink petals once during practice and the group spent the next month bullying him into getting the surgery. He didn’t tell anyone who he was in love with and no one asked. It didn’t matter. Just save him, save him,  _ save him _ . 

If Jaehyo had been the most adamant of them, well, that could be chalked up to caring about his friend, right? 

The other was when Minhyuk had realized he was in love with Yukwon, had come into Jaehyo’s room one night and nearly paced a hole in the floor. How could he feel like his heart was exploding and not have the disease? How could this feeling not be love when he was so sure it was? 

(It was love, of course it was, and on the other side of the wall, Yukwon was having the same gay panic. They don’t panic about that anymore.)

Both times, Jaehyo spent months plagued by nightmares. Both times, he dreamt of blue flowers and bloody petals and graves overtaken by sweet-smelling blossoms. He dreamt of his friends choking on flowers and he woke up crying, sometimes screaming, with arms around him. Sometimes it was Jiho, holding him down so he didn’t thrash. Sometimes it was Jihoon pulling him into a hug and patting his back. Most often, it was Taeil, who held him close and wiped the tears off of his face and teased and bullied him until he couldn’t think about the nightmare, just whined at him to stop calling him chicken feet. Most often, it was Taeil, who stayed with him until he could breathe again. Most often, it was Taeil, who curled up with him so he could go back to sleep. 

That’s why this new development is such a shitshow for him. That’s why this is such a fucking nightmare. 

Jaehyo an feel the eyes on him, but he can’t look up, can’t look away from the scattering of tiny, tiny white petals on the table. “Taeil?” he asks, voice shaking a little. “Taeil, what is this?”

There’s no response. Slowly, he draws his eyes up and looks at his friend, usually giving him that smile that’s verging on teasing but now with a guilty expression. “You know what that is, Jaehyo,” he mumbles. 

They stare at each other for another few moments. Silence hangs heavy in the room between them and if Jaehyo didn’t know better, he’d think it would break the table with the weight. Finally, he scoops the petals up and drops them in the trash. “Get the surgery,” he said firmly. He will. Of course he will. Taeil isn’t stupid. 

“No,” he replies. 

Taeil is stupid. 

“What the fuck do you mean  _ no _ ?” Jaehyo demands, rounding on him. 

Taeil levels him with a look and the seriousness, the tension, vanishes, burned up in the heat of sudden temper. “I mean no, Jaehyo, I’m not getting the surgery. They’re my flowers and I’ll keep them if I want.”

He gets up, heading to his room, and Jaehyo follows. “Are you fucking serious? Taeil, you could die. Whoever these are for, they don’t love you. They don’t deserve these flowers.”

“What do you know about them?” Taeil scoffs. “You don’t even know who it is. And they deserve whatever I want to give them.” 

Jaehyo opens his mouth, takes a breath to say more, but the door slams in his face and he jerks back. He calls Jiho, unsure what to do, because now  _ he _ can’t breathe either, and he doesn’t know if it’s because he’s panicking or if it’s because he’s imaging the petals clogging his throat. 

Taeil hears him on the other side of the door and swings it open again. “Are you tattling on me?” he demands, and that’s how the whole thing falls apart. Jaehyo’s phone goes skittering across the floor when Taeil gets him wrestled to the ground and pins him there. They yell at each other. Before they get up, they’re both back to laughing. 

When they part ways again, as Jaehyo starts to put on his headset to play a game, he hears coughing from the other room and his chest clenches. 

***

The thing about being the only ones in the dorm now is that there’s no one around but Jaehyo to take care of Taeil. Not that Kyung ever helped anyway.

He’s the one that has to help him home when he gets drunk. He’s the one that gives him hangover cures. He’s the one that has to deal with him breaking into his room. He’s the one that cleans up the tiny white petals he leave like a trail of breadcrumbs. He’s the one that brings him water when the coughing gets bad. He’s the one that’s there, every day, to tell him to get the surgery. 

“They don’t love you, Taeil. They aren’t worth this.”

“But I love them,” he replies every time. “So I say they are.”

Jaehyo wants to scream. He was to throw himself into traffic. He wants to throw  _ Taeil _ into traffic. He wants to stage an intervention with all of the members and force him to get the surgery. Fuck whoever it is. Fuck them. Fuck them for hurting Taeil. Fuck them for hurting his friend. 

He’s bringing him home one night, after too much to drink, because that’s what he does, when the rest of his world comes crashing down around him. 

“It’s been six months,” Taeil slurs, leaning against Jaehyo and burying his face against him. It makes it hard to walk. 

“Since what?” Jaehyo sighs, trying to hook an arm more securely around him and guide his stumbling feet. He’s heavy with muscle, despite how short he is, and Jaehyo isn’t sure he could carry him fully. 

Taeil hums, not answering right away. “You smell good.”

“I had to get out of the shower to come get you,” he replied dryly. “You fucking drunk.”

“I like it when you come get me.” 

Jaehyo rolls his eyes. His arm is starting to hurt and he wonders if he could get him switched over to the other side. Why couldn’t he drink closer to home? At least they don’t have to take the bus this time.

“Since I started coughing.”

He stops abruptly, blinking in confusion. He knows that this is Taeil picking the conversation back up where it left off, but it’s like he’s trying to get the clutch on an old car to work, like his brain is being flooded like an engine. 

“You should get the surgery before it’s too late, then,” he says tightly, drawing him closer and starting to walk again. Aching arm be damned. He wants to be home. 

“I don’t want the surgery,” he grumbles. “I want to love him. I want him to love me.”

“He’s an idiot if he doesn’t love you,” Jaehyo finds himself snapping, without really thinking about why. Taeil hums something that sounds like an assent, wraps both arms around him and stops helping to move. It forces Jaehyo to come to a stop, unable to drag him along like this. “Taeil, come on. We gotta get you home.”

The arms around him squeeze a little tighter, face tucking down into his sweater. “He’s not going to love me.”

“Then you should get the surgery.”

“I don’t want to stop loving him.”

Jaehyo frowns tightly, hating this, hating that this is a thing they have to talk about, hating they have to do this when he’s drunk. Hating that they have to do this at all. “I don’t… want to lose you, Taeil,” he mumbles, and the only reason he has the courage to say it is because he doesn’t think he’ll remember it in the morning. 

He looks up and his glasses are skewed and his cheeks are flushed. “If he doesn’t love me, does that mean no one will?”

“I love you,” Jaehyo says, almost without thinking, and he doesn’t mean it like that, but he  _ means it _ , and it’s terrifying, because he’s never said that to anyone. Ever. 

Taeil shakes his head. “You don’t.”

“I do too. Don’t tell me who I love.”

As if on cue, Taeil starts coughing. He would double over if he wasn’t leaning on Jaehyo so heavily. It lasts… too long. Pale petals and tiny seeds and little, curled up blossoms erupt from his throat, but they’re streaked in red now. Jaehyo feels tears stinging his eyes and as Taeil sinks, he sinks with him, keeps his arm around him. He doesn’t pull away when red splatters his sweater, ruining it. He’ll never wear it again, because he’ll think of this every time he sees it. 

Taeil is down on the pavement, hands and knees, and he’s coughing so hard his body is wracked with it, he’s coughing so hard he’s shaking. Jaehyo doesn’t know what to do, just keeps rubbing his hand along his back and trying not to feel like he’s dying himself. 

When he gasps himself to a stop, the pavement under them is covered in white and red, bright in the moonlight, and spit and blood and petals are dripping from Taeil’s lips. “See?” he chokes. “You don’t love me.”

Jaehyo stills as horror hits him and he jerks back so fast he falls over. 

It’s a little while before Jaehyo composes himself enough to drag Taeil the rest of the way home. He dumps him in bed and then goes to his room and panics. He sobs into his pillow and tries to rethink his entire life, tries to figure out how he fucked up this bad. 

This is his fault. He’s killing Taeil. He’s killing his friend. He’s killing him in the same way he still has nightmares of dying from, of his friends dying. He’s been so careful, ever since he saw bloody petals on his brother’s hands, keeping everyone at arm’s length. He’s been so careful not to love anyone too much, not to let anyone get too close to him. Too careful, apparently, but at the same time not careful enough, because now he was party to a murder. 

Jaehyo cries himself to sleep that night, and he wakes up with puffy eyes and a wet pillow and a weight over top of him. With a grunt, he rolls and doesn’t move at all. Taeil grumbles from where he’s laid crooked across his back and shifts, snuggling down onto his bony frame like it’s a comfortable mattress. 

“Taeil,” he mumbles, face mashed into the pillow by the other’s forearm. “Taeil, get off me.”

He mumbles, but doesn’t move in the least. A blanket comes up and covers his face, which covers Jaehyo too. Somehow, it’s not the blanket from his bed, which is still between them. It’s a whole other blanket. He drunkenly unlocked his door (again) and laid down on top of him and brought his own blanket with him after he was already tucked into a  _ different _ bed. 

Jaehyo groans again and starts to shift and wiggle until he manages to get free of the smaller body and thump heavily onto the floor, hands first. It takes a few moments to drag himself the rest of the way out of the bed, one leg staying trapped by Taeil’s grip on it, but he eventually yanks himself free. Taeil turns to snuggle into his pillow. 

Jaehyo stares at him for a moment as he coughs in his sleep, petals passing his lips. Delicate. White. Sweet. He wonders what they are. Has Taeil ever coughed up whole flowers? What kind of flowers grow for him?

He stares for a few more moments, then gets to his feet to go and shower. He has to wash his face, put on a mask, get rid of the redness and puffy skin so no one asks him what’s wrong tonight. While he’s trying to make breakfast, he opens his phone, starts looking through Naver without really thinking about it. 

When he focuses again, his thumb is hovering over a page.  _ What can I do if someone is growing flowers for me? _

He chokes and slaps the phone down onto the counter, screen turned away. His hands scrub over his face. 

_ What the fuck am I supposed to do? _

He fidgets around the kitchen for a few. He makes coffee, but doesn’t drink it. He makes tea and he does drink that. He does the dishes. He straightens the chairs at the table. He wipes down the counters. He paces. He picks up his phone. 

The article lists a few options. 

Ignore it. Unacceptable. Next. 

Try to convince the other party to get the surgery. Tried that. Failed. 

Match them up with someone else. Jaehyo considers this one for a few minutes, even puts his phone aside. He could see that. Taeil is popular. People love him. He’s cute and people think he’s funny. Maybe Jihoon. They were close before, and fans love them together, and they have something in common. They’ve both been sick like this. He abandons this thought quickly, though. Jaehyo is not and never has been a matchmaker. He wouldn’t know the first thing about it, and he thinks Taeil is probably too bullheaded to go for that. 

The last one stares up at him, italics on the page, bolded headline. 

_ Fall in love with them _ . 

Could he do that? 

He doesn’t know how to do that. 

God, he’s scared to do that. 

He hears noise from his room and tucks his phone away, grabs a cup of coffee made exactly as Taeil likes it, something he’s always kept in the back of his mind. He arrives to see him tangled in both blankets and his hoodie, trying to wrestle himself free. “Jaehyooo,” he whines, managing to get one hand free enough to reach toward the door where he’s standing. 

With a scoff, he moves forward, puts down the coffee cup and smacks the hand reaching for him out of the way. It takes a few moments to untangle him from the mound of cloth he was buried in, but eventually, Taeil squints up at him with messy hair and a face puffy from drinking the night before. “Glasses,” he croaks, covering his face with a brightly tattooed hand and coughing. Jaehyo tenses as he pulls white petals away. 

“Be right back. Coffee on the nightstand.” He turns sharply and goes to Taeil’s room, where he’d helped (read: poured like cake batter) him into bed the night before. He hears coughing in the other room and detours for tissues and the trash can from the bathroom. 

Taeil is still coughing when he comes back, doubled over on the bed. His question from before is answered now. Whole flowers are mingled with the seeds and the petals, small enough to make it through his windpipe and out onto the dark blanket. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t for the context. He kneels beside the bed and places the tissues in his lap, scoops up the petals that are still falling and dumps them into the trash can. 

“Get the surgery,” he says when Taeil stops coughing. 

Like a ritual, he croaks, “No.” He turns to grab the coffee and rubs at his temple. 

“You keep acting like this doesn’t affect me, Taeil, but it does. You know it does.”

“It doesn’t always work, you know,” he shoots back. “And it’s none of your fucking business who I love.”

“It is if it’s me!” Jaehyo snaps, and he regrets it a little when Taeil winces and then looks up sharply. Panic flickers across his face. “Do you not remember? You told me. Last night, you told me. It’s my business if it’s me, and I don’t want to lose you!”

“It shouldn’t matter,” Taeil insists, eyes darting around the room now like he’s analyzing escape routes. They settle on Jaehyo again, seeming to realize he couldn’t get the rest of the way untangled and out of the room safely and quickly without falling over himself. He starts to dig his way out again. “I want to keep this. The flowers- The flowers hurt, but I like being in love.”

Jaehyo stares at him. “Are you  _ kidding _ me? Taeil- Are you-  _ fuck _ , Taeil, you can’t- That’s so stupid! That’s so, so fucking stupid. You can’t just- You’re just going to let yourself die because you  _ like being in love _ ? That’s-”

“With you!” Taeil cuts in. He fights the rest of the way out of the blankets. “I like being in love with  _ you, _ you asshole. God-” He shoves him, sending Jaehyo stumbling aside so he can wobble to the door. “You’re so- You’re so stupid, you’re such an asshole. If I could have chosen  _ not _ to fall in love with you, I would, but I’m already here, Jaehyo. It’s done, and I’ve tried falling out of it. I’ve tried to not love you. But it doesn’t work, and if I get the surgery, it’ll just come back. It does that. Did you know it fucking does that? It does.”

Jaehyo blanched. No. He did not know that. “Maybe- Maybe you wouldn’t,” he starts, frowning tightly. 

“I  _ would _ ,” Taeil insists. He’s in the doorway now, and Jaehyo feels like the room is closing in. “I know it would. You don’t- Jaehyo, you’re so- How could I not love you?”

“I’ll stop. I’ll stop doing whatever it is that makes you love me.” He feels desperate. His throat feels tight, like it’s closing up. Like it’s full of flowers. Maybe this is what heartbreak feels like. 

“You won’t,” he snaps. “Jaehyo you-” He sighs, moves closer and reaches up, puts a hand on his cheek. “I love you, Jaehyo. I love when you’re stupid and I love when you’re mean and I love when you let me push you around and when you bring me home. I love you. As long as you’re around, I’m going to love you, and I don’t even want to imagine you not being around.”

A tear falls down his cheek. “I’ll- I’ll love you,” he says, his voice small, eyes unable to tear away from him. 

A smile pulls at his lips, the tint from the day before spotty. “Sure, Jaehyo. If you say so. But until then, or until the flowers go away, can we just… forget it? Can we just be how we were?”

It feels like a death sentence, but Jaehyo nods. Taeil pats his face, thumbs over his cheek, then goes and gets his coffee. “I’m gonna go take a shower. I feel like death.”

He knows it’s a joke, but Jaehyo doesn’t think it’s funny. 

Later, when he’s trying to straighten his blankets out, a small white flower falls out onto the sheets. Jaehyo holds it carefully in his palm, thumbs over the petals where they’re tinged with blood. He lays it on his pillow and goes about the rest of his day. 

When he’s laying in bed that night, he pulls up a drama and tries to watch it, tries to figure out how to fall in love. He doesn’t even know where to start. His own drama is useless, he knows, because that’s not about two people falling in love, and neither of them are injured, so he can’t count on that. He also doesn’t know anything about medicine. So. 

He gets through two whole episodes of one of these before he realizes that this is also useless, and maybe this whole idea is useless. His attention drifts to the flower that was sitting on his pillow, that’s sitting on the bedside table now. It’s bright white, beautiful, shining in the moonlight that’s coming in from his window. 

Before he knows what he’s doing, he’s looking the flower up. It takes a little while, but he’s pretty sure he’s found it. Coriander, which he’s pretty sure it actually a spice of some kind. Meaning:  _ Love _ . Not surprising. 

_ Health _ .  _ Healing _ . Tears well up in his eyes. It feels like a mockery. It feels like someone making fun of him. How could a flower that means health be growing in a person’s lungs, killing him slowly. 

_ Hidden worth _ . He chokes, curls up. Buries his face in the pillow. Maybe that’s him. Maybe his worth is hidden. Maybe that’s Taeil. Maybe it’s because Jaehyo feels like he’s been hidden from him for so long. 

He cries himself to sleep again and dreams of white flowers covering a grave, of bathroom tile splattered with tiny petals and streaked with blood, of losing his friend, of the love he feels not being enough because it isn’t the right kind of love. He wakes up screaming, with Taeil’s strong, inked arms pulling him in. He sobs into his oversized shirt and it’s so selfish. It’s disgusting. He feels hideous, because he clings to him and cries and Taeil is still coughing, but he’s holding him and humming softly in his high voice and rubbing his hands along his back. 

Jaehyo cries for what feels like forever, clinging to Taeil, cries himself back to sleep, and wakes again under the steady, comforting weight of another body wrapped around him. It would be nice, if not for the petals on his pillow and the stink of flowers on the breath ghosting over his face. 

He doubles down on his plan. 

For Taeil, things are much the same, but steadily getting worse. For Jaehyo, he tries as hard as he can, and his life and his sanity are rapidly deteriorating. He’s taken to watching rom coms so much he feels like his eyes will bleed soon. He doesn’t understand how to equate how Taeil acts with how any of these people do. On top of that, he’s started to jump every time he hears a cough, and Taeil seems to be noticing. He starts trying to hide the flowers before Jaehyo can see. 

On the other hand, they’re spending more time together. Not that they didn’t spend time together before, but it’s more now. Jaehyo goes out with Taeil sometimes, which he doesn’t like, but after a little while, Taeil starts staying in with him. He hangs out while Jaehyo plays games. Jaehyo asks him about his tattoos. He’s heard the stories, but he listens more carefully now, with purpose. He asks Taeil about his fish, just to listen to him talk. They watch shitty romcoms and dramas together.

It’s been a month, and Jaehyo thinks he likes Taeil in a way that could lead to love. That’s not enough, though, because now it’s been seven months, and Jaehyo watches the calendar like a fucking hawk. If it’s been seven months, that means Taeil has five left, give or take, depending on how well he remembers it, and how truthful he’s been. Given the amount of coughing he does, and how often he has to cancel on things because he’s exhausted and aching and can’t breathe through the petals, Jaehyo thinks seven months is wrong. 

He has to fall in love faster. If this were a game, he would be losing. 

But it isn’t a game. He’s still losing. 

Sometime halfway through that seventh month, either Jaehyo or Taeil gives up on sleeping separately. He’s not sure who it is that gives in. Either way, they end up together by the end of the night. Either Taeil wakes up coughing so loudly is rouses Jaehyo and he comes, rubbing his back and bringing him water. He swipes the flowers into the garbage again and when Taeil gives him sad eyes and wipes the blood from his lips, Jaehyo curls up with him and lets him hold onto him, hums him to sleep and strokes his hair. If that doesn’t happen, then Jaehyo wakes up gasping for air and dreaming of graves and beds of flowers and finds himself already cocooned in his arms and his face buried in his shoulder. 

He wants to love him. He wants to love him so much that it hurts. He wants to love him so much that he starts to hate flowers, he starts to hate the smell of them, starts to hate the sight of them. Every time he cleans petals up from the sofa or the pillow or takes out the trash, he wants to throw up. He wants to hurt someone. He knows that the only one to blame is himself. 

He wants to love him. 

The next month comes and Taeil has to go to the hospital. It has to stay a secret, because their fans can’t know he’s got hanahaki. Their fans can’t know that he refuses to get the surgery. There are pictures after on Naver of Jaehyo and Taeil in face masks heading for the car. Taeil looks like shit, pale and weak. They both do. They’ve got matching circles under their eyes. Jaehyo keeps an arm around him. The pictures make their fans coo, but send them into a panic. 

Jaehyo can’t think about that, because at the hospital, the doctor gives them both a hard look. “Do you want some privacy?” he asks, shooting a glance at Jaehyo. 

Taeil shakes his head. “He’s my boyfriend.” 

Jaehyo flinches. They haven’t talked about that before, have never used that word, but he’s not going to deny it now. He sort of is. He guesses.

The doctor looks shaken, then gives a guilty Jaehyo a look like he personally shoved flowers down Taeil’s throat. “Well… You’re almost ten months in-” he starts, and is cut off. 

Jaehyo turns on him, guilt forgotten as he whacks him. “Are you fucking kidding me? I knew you were fucking lying, god-”

“I wasn’t!” Taeil whines, shoving him back. “I thought it was seven! I didn’t lie!”

“You fucking drink too much, god. You forgot how long you’ve been sick? Really?”

“Gentlemen,” the doctor interrupts, frowning even more tightly. “Ten months, give or take a week or so. You should have been getting regular check ups before now. It… may be too late for surgery.”

Jaehyo takes a sharp breath through his nose and fights the urge to start yelling at him again. His head falls, hands fisting in his hair. Taeil drops a hand of his own to his back. He has no right to be comforted right now, but he doesn’t shake it off. He needs it. 

“It seems to be coming to a halt, though.”

Jaehyo looks up sharply. “What?”

X-ray sheets are brought up and lifted to a board, the light switched on. “We would have more information if we could have had previous comparisons, but from how far this seems to have come, they should be in a rapid growth by now.” He points to where they can see Taeil’s lungs, full of petals and wrapped in roots. “As you can see, though, there’s more inside the lungs themselves than on the stems.” Another sheet comes up and he points to the heart, strangled in roots and stems. “If it continues at the rate it’s been at, your heart will collapse within the next month or two. If it’s halted, however, you should see development and improvement shortly.” He turns, gives Jaehyo another hard look. Judgemental. Angry. “If it’s halted, you should pull through. You’ll have to cough up the rest of the petals, but once that’s behind you, you should be back to good health.”

Jaehyo turns, gives Taeil a shocked look. Taeil is still staring at the x-rays. There are tears shining in his eyes behind the thick glasses. 

“Taeil,” he mumbles, slapping at his arm. “Taeil, fucking-” He stands, turns his back to the doctor and grabs his face. 

Their first kiss is not romantic. There’s no triple-shot reaction like in the dramas. There’s no soft lighting. There’s no sweet music. They’re in the hospital, under the harsh lights, and he tastes like flowers and his breath smells like nightmares, and it’s wet in a way that’s from relieved tears, not spit-slick passion. 

Jaehyo kisses Taeil until he’s breathless anyway, until he has to pull away to catch his breath. Taeil doesn’t waste a moment, dropping down a little to kiss at his jaw, pull him closer with insistent, desperate hands until Jaehyo is on the hospital bed with him. They’re both crying, and they’re both exhausted and weak, but Jaehyo pulls Taeil into a kiss again once he’s got his breath back. He presses him down into the shitty mattress with the scratchy sheets and opens his lips when he feels a wet tongue against them. 

They pull apart again once they’ve memorized the way one another’s mouths feel, once they’ve licked into each other until they can’t breathe, once they’ve stopped for air and started again, an stopped once more when Taeil had to cough up petals. 

Jaehyo isn’t scared of them anymore, because it’s a purge now. He’s getting rid of the time before, when Jaehyo was stupid, and didn’t understand how important he was. When he didn’t see his hidden worth. 

He brushes the petals off onto the floor and looks around. When did the doctor leave? How long had they been kissing? He looks back down at Taeil and realizes he’s got a knee on either side of his hips on the narrow bed and his hands on on Jaehyo’s hips, gripping lightly. They’re only getting away with it because Taeil was dying before and he’s probably not now. Jaehyo is pretty sure he’s not. Jaehyo is pretty sure he’s in love with him. 

He’s been so scared of this his whole life, has taken the coward’s way out and kept people away, but he thinks it would be braver to not fall in love with Lee Taeil and face the world on his own. If it keeps him by his side, though, he’s fine with being a coward. 

“Maybe I should get the surgery,” Taeil says, once he catches his breath. 

Jaehyo snaps a look back down at him. “You are such a piece of shit.”

**Author's Note:**

> Yell at me on twitter!! 
> 
> @6uglyguysandjae


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